Your Dough is My Dough: Shamrock Shake Playdough

We come from a long line of Irish folk and LOVE us some St. Patrick's Day. I mean, my favorite color is already green, so .... Mom's been talking up something called a shamrock shake lately -- apparently it was one of her favorite holiday treats growing up. Then she mentioned to a friend she was planning on taking us to Old Macdonalds for our first taste and said friend relayed her own experience last year where her kids went into a sugar-induced high followed by a vomitous downer. Mom rethought her plan and came up with this: shamrock shake playdough. All the holiday fun without the tummy rollercoaster. OK, not ALL the fun, but it was still a pretty good time.

Here's the shamrock scoop:

Shamrock Shake Playdough

Ingredients:

- 4 cups flour

- 4 cups water

- 1 cup salt

- 2 tablespoons cooking oil

- 4 teaspoons cream of tartar

- 1/2 - 1 tablespoon of peppermint extract (depending on how strong you want it to smell)

- 1/2 - 1 tablespoon of vanilla extract (same)

- green and yellow food coloring

- green and gold glitter

- gold coins (mom picked up these shamrock ones in the Target dollar bins) or other St. Patty's Day appropriate props (we also used heart cookie cutters to make shamrocks)

Directions:

Combine ingredients through extracts and cook over medium heat, stirring constantly until most of the moisture is absorbed (it will take a bit). Let it cool on some wax paper. Divide the batch into halves and work green and yellow food coloring into the respective halves. Add glitter to each and work it in. 

(mermaids are totally friends with leprachauns)

Rainbow Connection: Rainbow Roller Painting

We go through a ridiculous number of paper towels in our house -- it's not particularly environmentally friendly, so we generally try to save the rolls and at least do something creative with them.  We've spotted several cool paper towel painting projects recently (like this) and thought we'd try out a rainbow one for St. Patty's Day.  We just squirted drops of tempera paint onto a paper towel roll in a rainbow pattern and then rolled it out onto paper.  Mom, knowingly against her better judgment, let me do the squeezing.  But I surprised everyone and showed some restraint.  I did several prints with one roll and then started over.  And by my the third roll, I was over rainbows, but continued to roll the colors out in a pattern (instead of mixing them all together, which is what I usually do).  I also did one where I squeezed little bits of paint around on the page directly.  Cami rolled for a bit, but then wanted to mix all of the colors together.  And then she wanted to paint her face.  And then she was in the bath.  

I really liked doing this and think the rolls themselves turned out pretty cool looking.  We're trying to decide if we should turn the paintings into something else or leave them as is.  Maybe a rainbow garland?  We still have our heart one up!

Let's Play Holi: Colored Rice and Quinoa Sensory Bin

We have been on a little break from holiday arts and crafts (we od'd a bit on Valentine's Day) and mom hasn't quite yet geared up for dealing with the Passover and Easter madness.  But we are a bit Irish and fans of St. Patty's Day (we do have some GelGems up), so we got it together and are focusing on rainbows this year in celebration.  We had just made some rainbow colored rice and quinoa for our sensory bins and had them drying on the table.  Mom mentioned that she thought they looked just like the piles of color used for the Hindu festival of Holi.  So we were super excited when mom checked and found out that Holi starts today!

A few years ago, when I was just three months old, daddy spent many 4 - 6 week periods of time on a matter in India.  Yes, you read that correctly.  When I was three months old.  And not sleeping at all.  And crying all night long.  Oh and it was the middle of winter.  Daddy swears all he did was work miserably when he was there and that "playing Holi" was the one cool thing he did.  We don't know if we believe him - in fact mom said she would have done pretty much anything to be alone for 18 hours in first class on an airplane.  I think she still would.  We did get to go meet up with him one time in London, but mom's recollection of her flight back with me (by herself) was that I screamed the entire 8-hour flight.

In any event, in celebration of both St. Paddy's Day and Holi, we played for a long while with our colored rice and quinoa and some bugs.  Mom and Cami colored it with our Wilton's gel color, roughly following this tutorial.  You can see that the rice took the color more brilliantly.  We had a blast -- Cami did a lot of scooping and filling.  I made tunnels and volcanoes with my bugs and waged all kinds of attacks.  And we even got in on the cleanup.

p.s. - mark your calendars - Mom is eagerly awaiting her turn to "play Holi" at this run in September.

cam mixing it up

i came out before bedtime when mom had all the colors out drying and insisted she take a pic of me in front of each and every color.  and she thought it was so cute she is posting all of them.

all ready to play!

daddy playing Holi